K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

At long last: Online at home

Finally, after about two weeks of wrangling and deciphering and even brute-force experimentation, I’m online and running at full speed at home. (Insert huge sigh of relief here.)

Without too much complication, suffice to say that (I think) I had to set my VDSL modem with the account and username of my ISP, and (I think) now everything is good. My fingers are crossed, but I have a feeling it will be smooth sailing from here on out.

The setup was through a proprietary program for Windows only, and needed the proper character sets installed in order to be understood … as best I can. My first Windows installation I didn’t install the character sets, so of course I had no idea what was going on. After I figured out how to make windows show hiragana, katakana and kanji, I could at least track my progress against the installation manual.

And after I installed two or three thingamajobs, I finally got the user account linkup page, managed to get the right account names in the right boxes, and now everything’s working — in Windows and in Linux. Once the information is set, it doesn’t seem to need resetting, and I don’t have to redial on reboot. So I’m a happy camper.

The best part is, my speeds are twice what I was getting on a cable modem in the states. It’s been a long time since I used DSL — and of course, I’d never used it in Japan (because I’d never lived in Japan before) — but this is considerably better than what I was getting back in 2000 and 2001.

Recently I got ADSL account with Covad here in the states. They gave me a DSL Wifi router with an internal NAT and DHCP. The technician who installed the line actually configured the router for me and typed in the username/password stuff in there.

All you had to do was to plug yourself in, or connect to the Wifi network. Of course that was the exact opposite of what I wanted – I just wanted a modem, that I could put outside my Sonicwall Firewall… Sigh…

Anyway some DSL companies go above and beyond now to make installation as painless and trouble free as possible.